cover that these were actually more SBDs—
with their tailgunners trained on him! Several
bursts of machine fire riddled his cockpit,
smashing his canopy and injuring his right
eye. Sakai was unconscious for several min-
utes and fell 11,000 feet but managed to re-
cover and pull up. He stuffed his silk scarf
under his helmet to stop the bleeding and
then struggled to regain altitude.
His subsequent actions entered aviation
lore as one of the most remarkable flights
ever. Dazed and nearly paralyzed, Sakai
nursed his crippled aircraft for four and a half
hours back to Rabaul, a distance of more than
500 miles. His squadronmates, who had writ-
ten him off as dead hours earlier, watched in
jaw-dropping amazement as he landed his
Zero,climbed out of the cockpit, and col-
lapsed. “The indescribable feeling I had when
my feet touched ground was a supreme mo-
ment that can only belong to a pilot,” Sakai
observed. “No one else can ever understand.”
It was an epic flight for survival. When asked
how he managed to survive, the battered pilot
explained how he repeatedly experienced a
vision of his mother, scolding him to push on.
Sakai was rushed back to Japan for sur-
gery, although he lost all vision in his right
eye. He then commenced a long period as an
instructor and grew distraught teaching
greater numbers of young men fewer combat
skills. The attrition of pilots was so great that
Japan simply lacked available time to prepare
them properly. At length, even instructors
were forced back into the front lines, a
prospect that the one-eyed ace greeted with
relief. By June 1944, Sakai flew from Iwo Jima
as part of the Yokosuka Kokutai. On June 24
he tangled with a large formation of Grum-
man F6F Hellcats,shooting down three. His
unit, however, lost 32 pilots in exchange—a
good indication of how much Japanese aerial
quality had declined. On July 5, 1944, Sakai
next escorted kamikaze aircraft against the
U.S. fleet, downing another Hellcat,but be-
came embittered over this deliberate sacrifice
of trained personnel. In December 1944, one
month before Iwo Jima’s capture by U.S.
forces, Sakai transferred back to Japan. There
he functioned as an instructor with the elite
343rd Kokutai, a handpicked fighter group fly-
ing the all-new Kawanishi N1K2 Shinden-kai
fighter. His last combat mission occurred on
August 17, 1945—two days after Japan’s sur-
render announcement, when he intercepted
and damaged a Consolidated B-32 Dominator
on a reconnaissance flight over Tokyo. By the
time the war ended, he was generally ac-
knowledged to have shot down at least 64 Al-
lied aircraft. As an expression of his consum-
mate skill as a fighter pilot, not once, in 200
dogfights, did he ever lose a wingman. More
ominously, of his original class of 25 pilots, he
was the sole survivor.
After the war, Sakai settled down in Tokyo
as a printer. He also became active in fighter-
pilot reunions in Japan and the United States,
and he befriended many of his former adver-
saries—and they him. The famous one-eyed
ace died in Tokyo on September 22, 2000, one
of the great fighter pilots of all time.Bibliography
Hata, Ikuhiko, and Yasuho Izawa. Japanese Naval Aces
and Fighter Units in World War II.Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1989; Huggins, Mark. “Young
Guns: Japan’s Elite Tainan Kokutai.” Air Enthusi-
ast,no. 89 (September/October, 2000): 18–24; No-
hara, Shigeru. Mitsubishi A6M Zero Fighter.
Tokyo: Dai Nippon Kaiga, 1993; Peattie, Mark R.
Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power,
1909–1941.Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
2001; Sakai, Saburo. Samurai!New York: Dutton,
1957; Sakaida, Henry. Imperial Japanese Navy
Aces, 1937–45. Oxford: Osprey, 1999; Sakaida,
Henry. Winged Samurai: Saburo Sakai and the
Zero Pilots.Mesa, AZ: Champlin Fighter Museum
Press, 1985; Yoshimura, Akira.Zero Fighter.West-
port, CT: Praeger, 1996.SAKAI, SABURO